Auditor General Sheila Fraser is rebuking the Conservatives for using an old quote of hers praising the Liberals as proof she approved of last year’s G8/G20 spending by the Tories.

In another twist in the summit spending uproar, Auditor General Sheila Fraser is demanding an old quote of hers be removed from a recent G8/G20 spending report.

By:Les WhittingtonOttawa Bureau, Published on Mon Apr 11 2011

OTTAWA—Auditor General Sheila Fraser is rebuking the Conservatives for using an old quote of hers praising the Liberals as proof she approved of last year’s G8/G20 spending by the Tories.

In another twist in the summit spending uproar, Fraser is demanding that the quote cited by the Tories be removed from a recent report by a Commons committee that studied how the Harper government spent $1.2 billion on the Muskoka and Toronto summits.

“We found that the processes and controls around that were very good and that the monies were spent as they were intended to be spent,” Fraser is quoted as saying in the dissenting report written by Conservative MPs on the committee.

But Fraser says bluntly in a letter to former chair and Liberal candidate John McKay that the quote had nothing to do with last year’s summits. It was taken from a 2010 media report referring to the auditor general’s assessment of national security spending by the Liberal government in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, she says.

“The comments attributed to me in the (dissenting Conservative) report are completely unrelated to G8/G20 spending,” Fraser wrote on April 8.

Noting that she did not give testimony before the Commons government operations committee during its investigation of G8/G20 spending, she demanded that the dissenting report be corrected “as it is clearly erroneous.”

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